


In the Forest of Stone

by The Wicked Symphony (SymphonyWizard)



Series: Of Shields and Widow’s Bites [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst, Steve Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 22:29:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17394872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SymphonyWizard/pseuds/The%20Wicked%20Symphony
Summary: Steve has a long overdue conversation with the only parent he ever knew.





	In the Forest of Stone

It’s cold.  Actually, it’s downright freezing.  It bites at Steve’s skin with the force of a thousand tiny prickles.  Not to say that he is actually freezing.  He’s actually quite warm. He has bundled himself to the teeth with a heavy, well-insulated coat with leather gloves and a large scarf wrapped stylishly around his neck.  His exposed skin however, his cheeks especially feel the effects of the cold.  After a while it feels as though he has rubbed sandpaper on them. 

In another situation, he would rather be inside.  He would rather be a couch huddling under a fleece blanket with his new fiancée.  He can count on one hand how many people are aware of his engagement.  The press would have a field day; his colleagues would have mixed reactions; most would be wondering the hell did the relationship even begin.  He’s confident that most of his colleagues don’t even know that he has been a relationship for the better part of a year. 

He wouldn’t be surprised if his former superior, Nick Fury, knew.  Even from the shadows without an agency to back him up, the one-eyed old man seems to have ears just about everywhere.  Actually, there is an agency running under the name of S.H.I.E.L.D., but on an unofficial and likely less funded basis.

His fiancée is a woman who normally keeps her opinions to herself, but something that she has no reservations about is her feelings about her engagement ring.  He could have gotten her a fancier ring, but it's the one that attracted him the most.  His mother taught him that sometimes it's the simpler elegance that speaks louder volumes.  He didn't need to spend a ridiculous amount of money to prove his love.  And on their wedding day, he plans on giving her his mother's ring.  Growing up, he remembers his mother never wearing her wedding bands.  Losing his father when she did had a profound effect on her and she never once sought another relationship.  There were a number of potential suitors during the time he had with her, but she always found a reason to turn them down. 

She wanted to prove that she didn’t need a man in her life to not only provide for herself, but to also raise a frail son.  She didn’t completely reject help however.  Through Steve’s friendship with Bucky, their parents grew very close.  On Sundays when his mother did have to work, they went to the Barnes’ for dinner.  When she had to work late, he would stay at the Barnes’.  She never needed any help in order to make ends meet, never even had to take out a loan. 

She was a strong woman right up until the very end.  She was strong even when it was Steve’s turn to take care of her. 

One of the last things that she ever gave him was her wedding band.  At the time, he was doubtful that he would ever find a woman, but his mother's faith was unwavering.  Worried that he would lose it in the war, he stored it away in a safety deposit box.  When he went to that bank to retrieve it, it must have been a great day for the people at that bank, having Steve Rogers there.  The ring was still in good condition and it pretty much increased in value.  Similarly, his bank account left behind in 1945 became modestly larger due to inflation.   

His fiancée has all but fallen in love with his mother from how much he has talked about her.  She would much rather be wearing her engagement ring on her finger instead of a necklace or somewhere out of sight.  It’s obvious to him that she is quite proud to be his future wife, but at the same time, they aren’t keen on the publicity that that would create.

What would the world say to Captain America and Black Widow getting married?  Worse yet, what would it mean for them if they started a family?  Natasha cannot get pregnant, but they could definitely adopt couldn’t they?  For that matter, what adoption agencies would feel comfortable with the two of them adopting a parentless child?

Steve believes that Natasha would be a great mother, but that doesn’t mean everyone would share that opinion.

Maybe if he were anywhere else, these thoughts would feel less gloomy. 

Since everyone had gone their separate ways for the holidays, Tony being Tony wanted to throw together a late New Year party.  As far as Steve could tell, everyone agreed.  Thor, being an Asgardian god didn’t really have the same sort of celebrations for the New Year, but in his own words “Jotunheim would have to freeze over before he passed up food and wine.”   

So an impromptu New Year’s party a couple of weeks in January was planned at Avengers Tower.  As far as Steve knows, a good number of people answered the open invite.  He’s been an Avenger long enough to know that very few would pass up an opportunity to party with the Avengers.  Hell, he has experienced that when he was just Captain America the soldier. 

Yet, he had no intention of attending.  He said he had other things to do.  He needed to be alone.  Natasha reminded him with a smirk what a terrible liar he is, but she didn’t press the subject.  As much as they love each other, they also know when to give each other space. 

So instead of being in a skyscraper where he could be warm and surreptitiously enjoying his fiancée’s company, he is out in the cold in a cemetery in Brooklyn.

Not to think the obvious, but the place has changed significantly since the last time he has been here.  It’s one of the older cemeteries in Brooklyn with tombstones dating back all the way to the American Civil War.  Rows and rows of headstones stand erect, protruding from the snow-encrusted ground like dark spikes on a battlefield.  Actually, it could be a forest of stone, or a city of the dead encircled by an even larger city thriving with life. 

Each headstone stands as a last reminder of a passed life, sometimes where living memories have all but died as well.  Who were all these people in life?  Did they live full lives?  Were their lives accentuated with prolonged periods of joy that outweighed the hardships of life?  Were their lives taken from them prematurely?  Did they die by the hands of another, or from incurable pestilence, or genuine accidents?  What did they leave behind?  How long was it before everyone who knew them died as well? 

It’s like that all that’s left are names engraved into headstones.  One headstone Steve passes is a girl who died at the tender age of seven.  An old man who lived to the ripe age of ninety-seven; a married couple who died within ten years of each other; an entire family who died the same day under a headstone nearly as tall as him with a hooded angel on top of it; is there anybody out there who remembers them?

The deeper Steve walks into the cemetery, the worse the pit in his stomach becomes.  Every crunch of snow below his feet feels like a disturbance towards the dead.  A series of rude interruptions to the otherwise peaceful rest of the ones who have passed on and there is little he can do about it.

Eventually, he finds the headstone he is looking for.  Despite his protests, Bucky’s family paid for the headstone.  A granite slab which seems to have stayed preserved for all this time.  The tombstone next to hers, however, looks significantly worse.  Steve can still make out his father’s name on the face of it, but it’s so weathered that it could be his imagination.  It’s possible that he only “sees” it because he knows from memory where the engravings are supposed to be. 

He swallows hard.  “Hi, Ma,” he greets.  It’s the first time that he has actually said in so long, since even before he crashed the _Valkyrie_ into the ice.  “It’s been a long time hasn’t it?” he points out.  “Would you even recognize me?”  He does wonder that.  Before the war, he visited his mother’s grave every month.  The last time he visited was right before he was sent to basic training. 

“A lot has happened,” Steve observes.  “Remember me telling you about how much I was struggling to get a chance to serve?  I finally got my chance.  I was given a serum that made me what I am right now.  I never had an asthma attack again.”  He laughs, glancing around briefly before wiping his face with his free hand.  “You were always so hyper-concerned with my well-being.  I know I didn’t make things much easier for you, coming home most days with new bruises on top of my precarious health.  You never once criticized me for standing up to bullies. You just wished I would stop getting hurt all the time.  I think I remember you telling me once that if I’m going to be getting myself beat up all the time, I might as well start charging bullies for every punch or kick.”

He laughs at the memory.  “I’m sure that that would have saved me a few student loans at art school.  Speaking of which, I’m sorry I never finished.  The war broke out and I just wanted to enlist.  Who knows?  Maybe I could have become a famous artist instead of the world’s first super soldier.  I remember people did pay me nicely for my artwork, but then again I think a lot of people never even gave me the chance to show them what I could do simply because I was so small and fragile.

“Sometimes I think I am still that small and fragile boy you raised.  I might be big now, but I’m still the same boy you came home to after work.  I’m still a bit inept when it comes to women.  After I joined the Army, I met a woman.  She was a British Intelligence liaison who worked with my unit.  She was a quite a woman.”  Steve smiles wistfully.  “We never even got that chance to go on a date.  Not just because I ‘didn’t know a bloody thing about women’ but because I sacrificed myself to save the world.  Maybe if I were a little more perspicacious, I would have known all along that she did like me.  I just wasn’t very assertive.

“Now she’s an old woman and I still have much of my life ahead of me.”  He can’t really tell what’s making him more emotional—the fact that he is talking about Peggy or that he is talking to a tombstone.  Breathing hard, he tries to continue. 

“I did meet end up meeting someone else.  In fact, I don’t even know if there was much of an attraction when we first met.  We were brought together to fight off an otherworldly threat, so there wasn’t much room for getting to know each other beyond the simple exchange of names.  I called her ‘ma’am’ and this is a time period when that doesn’t seem to be the norm.  I don’t understand it.  If you ask me, sometimes I think that this generation is severely lacking in etiquette.  I don’t see too much of the ways that you taught me to treat a lady.

“Anyway, we might not have gotten much of an initial opportunity to get to know one another, but weirdly enough we worked very well together as if we had done it before.  So well, in fact, that when I was given an opportunity to do what I know best, I was quickly partnered up with her.  It wasn’t the smoothest transition.  I essentially replaced the partner she already had, but he was benched for reasons that would take a long time for me to explain. 

“Eventually, though, things smoothed out.  Not only did I gain a new partner, but I also gained a friend.  Well, a tacit friend, but a friend nonetheless.  She helped integrate me into this time period.  We even started seeing more of each other outside of work.  There was a bit of a rough period between us when I realized she was keeping secrets from me when I thought we were closer than that, but things worked out.  And you know what?

“I fell in love with her.  We are very much opposites and sometimes it leads to nasty arguments, but I also think that that is why I love her.  She will kick a man off the roof just to get him to listen.  I’d never do that.  She does have a bit of a dark past, but I love her anyway.  I don’t judge her for what she might have done in the past. 

“She will never tell me when exactly, or even how, but she has fallen in love with me too.  And this past Christmas Eve, I proposed to her.”  He laughs again.  “Oh, goodness, if you had seen just how nervous I was, you probably would have just told me to shut up and be out with it.  I don’t think that she has had a lot of good things happen to her in life, so when I did tell her that I loved her, she ran off.  I was worried what would happen when I proposed, but she said yes.”

Steve’s lips tremble as his attempt to hold back his tears finally fails.  “I’m engaged and everyone I know is dead or unable to witness it, or is brainwashed and hiding somewhere out in the world.  I’m all alone, Ma.  I’m a man who is literally out of time.  I know that if you hadn’t gotten sick, you still would have died.  Is it better that you died when you did?  Would it have been too much for you if you had lived and faced the knowledge that I would never come home from the war?

“I’m sorry, Ma,” he sobs.  “I’m sorry that you aren’t here to see the man I’ve become.  And I’m sorry that you didn’t get to meet the woman I asked to become my wife.” 

He drops the bouquet of roses that was in his hand and covers his eyes as tears scald his cheeks.  Without realizing it, he falls to his knees in front of the headstone.  Just one more day, that’s all he would ask.  Just one more day to see everyone he once knew.  He would never ask for anything again. 

Soon, he feels a soft hand on his shoulder.  He would know that hand in his sleep.  He lifts his face and twists around to see Natasha standing behind him.   She’s wearing a tan coat with leather gloves, a black scarf with a matching wool beret.  Her green eyes glisten, not just from the cold, but also from sorrow. 

“How long were you standing there?”

“Long enough to know your mother thought you should start charging people for taking a swing at you,” replies Natasha.  He can hear the smirk in her words, but is overshadowed by tones of comfort. 

He rises to his feet and stares at her for a few seconds.  Soon she envelopes him in her arms, surrounding him with her small frame as fresh tears spill from his eyes.  He wraps his arms around her and revels in her healing warmth.

“I love you, Nat,” he whispers into her neck.

“I love you too, Steve,” she whispers back.  She pulls away and stares down at the headstone.  “It’s nice you meet you, Mrs. Rogers,” she says warmly.  “Thank you for raising such a wonderful man.  I probably would have given up if it weren’t for him.”

Steve does take a small amount of pride in that statement.  He wasn’t the one who gave her a second chance, steering her towards a better path in life, but he has done something even better for her.  He has fallen in love with her without asking for anything in return other than loving him back. 

He waits until her eyes return to his.  He would happily drown himself in those eyes, to take a plunge and never resurface.  If every morning could be spent just gazing in those green orbs, he would die the happiest man in the world.

“I don’t want to be alone,” he confesses. 

Rather than smirking for being right all along, Natasha just plants a kiss on his cheek and slips an arm around his.  “ _Let’s go home_ ,” she suggests in Russian.

Steve just nods and together they leave the cemetery, leaving behind the sorrow and heaviness of life long passed.   


End file.
